This game is absolutely horrible, its more of a soap opera than a surgery game.

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I have to say, this game is the ultimate 'love-it-or-hate-it.' If you don't mind the fact it's generally unpolished in terms of script and you don't mind drama, there's some good fun to be had there.

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The story sucks so bad, and there's too much of it. There's investigation like in Phoenix Wright, except they made it not fun. I quit before I got to the surgery, that's how bad everything else sucked. I hear the surgery is pretty good, though.

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This game rocks. Phoenix Wright but with surgery instead of court.

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Eh heh, based on that link it looks like I’ve been assigned the official Guy Who Doesn’t Hate Lifesigns by the DS Fanboy staff, so I’ll lend my impressions again to help people decide whether they’ll want this.

How this game differs from Trauma Center:

Lifesigns is not a surgery game at heart. The entire game takes, from my experience, roughly fifteen hours to get through, little of which is spent in surgery. It is largely an interactive storybook where the player controls the protagonist, who happens to be a doctor, although the story is not entirely medical-themed–two out of five of the chapters in the game don’t even take place in a hospital, and even within the hospital, the plot tends to center on the (sometimes rather strange) personal life of the doctor.

Trauma Center has quicker pacing. There tend to be only a few minutes’ worth of dialogue/plot advancement/et cetera between surgeries, whereas in Lifesigns you can spend hours between surgeries, of which I believe there are less than ten in the game.

There’s far greater doctor-patient interaction in Lifesigns. By the time most surgeries come about, you really feel motivated to save the individual, whereas in Trauma Center you’re presented with body after body and never feel any motivation beyond simply not killing the patient or running out of time.

Lifesigns also has an extra pre-surgery mode that involves diagnosing the patient using three different tools—the eye, hand, and stethoscope. This generally only takes one or two minutes, but I experienced a couple of instances where I nearly drove myself mad trying to complete diagnosis. Don’t be ashamed to use a walkthrough once or twice on this one.

Lifesigns’ surgeries are also designed differently—not only are all images 2D rather than Trauma Center’s 3D, but there is no standard tool set used with every surgery like in Trauma Center. You’ll be given a tool and told how to use it, and once you finish the given step of the operation the process repeats until the operation is finished.

There are no fantasy elements like the Healing Touch, GUILT, et cetera.

Lifesigns also features a mode not unlike Phoenix Wright’s psyche-locks. Often you will have to present an item or profile to advance the game, but on rare instances this psyche-lock-esque mode appears and one must use a series of items and profiles to convince an individual of something.

You will not like this game if:

You don’t like text-heavy games in general. This is on par with the textiest point-and-click adventure games on the DS.

You were off-put by Trauma Center’s anime designs. The characters in Lifesigns are even less western.

You have little interest in what some would call a soap-opera plot. There’s a lot of romance and drama, alright, and family issues to boot. If you don’t find the protagonist sympathetic or any of the other characters likable it can be incredibly difficult to muster the will to continue.

You’re looking for a surgery sim first and foremost—explained above.

You’re a stickler for spelling and grammar. Typos abound, and whoever translated the game had the annoying habit of throwing the Japanese title “–san” around a lot even when it wasn’t appropriate to make it seem more authentically Japanese.

You’re young and there’s a chance of your parents seeing you poking semi-nude bodies around with a stylus and getting the wrong impression. Hey, it’s one of the (many times unpleasant) realities of being a doctor, but…

You’re looking for something with re-play value. You can use points acquired during the game to unlock surgeries once you’ve beaten it, but the surgeries aren’t so amazing that they’re worth playing over again.

You might like this game if:

Any of the negatives in the last section sounded like positives.

I, personally, was only off-put by the soap opera elements of the plot and the incredibly long time between surgeries. You, the individual reading this, may be less or more tolerant of some of these other “flaws” or differences from Trauma Center. But, in the end, roughly $20 is a good price for it. Probably the price it should have debuted at, even.

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One of the main reasons I think this didn't do so well here is because this title, for the most part, is a distinctly Japanese adventure game. The surgeries are more mini-games than anything else and the majority of the game is just text text text. It's failure calls to mind all of those people lined up to play Doki Doki Majo Shinpan or Duel Love only to find that that the game was 95% talking and 5% touching. It also doesn't help that this is a localization of Tendo Dokuta 2 and not the first game of the series, leading to a lot of confusing and annoying backstory.

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